Free Choices of the Heart by Laurie Alice Eakes Page A

family related to Griff Tolliver if they at all resembled him.
    For all Zach’s golden good looks, Griff’s dark attractiveness in contrast to his pale blue eyes left her restless and afraid of what she didn’t know—him. It was quite enough to fear. Men who got themselves stabbed without knowing why made poor companions, surely. He made a poor one now, silent and too distant on his roan gelding. The horse blended into the surroundings as mist rose from the river and the sun sank behind the mountains on the other side of the water.
    Esther pictured another man sneaking up behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders, grinning at her pallid reflection in the kitchen window.
    She jumped and swung toward Zach fast enough to draw her horse into a sidle. “May we go? I want to get home. That is, to your house.”
    “You’ll be stopping at the Tollivers’.” Zach’s lips turned down a bit at his words. “I wish you were coming to our house, but they’re further along with their building than we are.”
    “They have the school building,” Hannah said. “And most of the mine, though my husband manages it.”
    “He must be very intelligent,” Esther responded, as she had the other two times Hannah told her this.
    Hannah snorted. “Most of the time. About mines anyway.” She wheeled her horse away from the riverbank and trotted up the path.
    “I’m sorry about that.” Zach rode alongside Esther on this wide track along the water. “He’s not the best husband at times, you may as well know. You’ll hear soon enough.”
    “I’m sorry.” What else could she say?
    She wanted to know nothing of these people’s lives beyond what she needed to know. She should not have interfered with Bethann, but a lifetime of observing her mother and her own training over the past six years had taken over her good sense, and she had to give her advice when it wasn’t sought. She knew better than to do that. But she’d felt so comfortable with Zach and Hannah by then, she thought—
    No, she hadn’t thought.
    “Lord, how can I ever—” She broke off the silent prayer before it was formed. Praying was before. God had failed to save her when she begged and pleaded. She wouldn’t ask for His help anymore. Mistakes or not, she would manage her future on her own.
    She plodded on beside and then behind the Brooks siblings. Darkness settled over them with stars seeming to hang upon the trees, guiding their way, until the moon rose in a brilliant shine to light the way to a fence created of upright saplings stripped of their bark so they gleamed white in the colorless light, and a gate also created out of whole tree trunks.
    “A stockade?” Despite the warm summer night, Esther’s skin rose in gooseflesh. “Surely it’s not . . . dangerous here.”
    “Not now,” Zach said with dauntless cheer. “But it used to be. The gate’s never locked.”
    He dismounted and opened the massive portal. It swung outward without a sound, but suddenly chickens and children and the tallest woman Esther had ever seen swarmed into the yard beyond. Lanterns blazed, and Griff appeared in their midst with an embrace and a word for each person.
    “Let me help you down.” Zach reached Esther’s side and held up his hand.
    She took it and slid to the ground. The hard-packed earth tilted and swayed beneath her wobbling legs, but Zach’s hand remained beneath hers, strong, hard from labor, not in the least something to flinch away from or fear touching.
    She smiled up at him. “Thank you so much for coming to get me. I’m certain we will see one another again.”
    “Soon. Very soon. I’ll bring my brothers to the school when it opens. Now come meet Aunt Lizbeth.” He led Esther forward to the tall woman presiding over what seemed like a dozen children swirling around Griff.
    The number of children proved to be only two girls and two boys between ten and fifteen years of age. The woman was almost as tall as her eldest son, with his pale